


Rickon the Wild

by shinymogwai



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, None of the Stark kids know how to be normal, Other, Post-Canon, least of all Rickon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-03
Updated: 2015-06-03
Packaged: 2018-04-02 16:15:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4066414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinymogwai/pseuds/shinymogwai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They don't have to run anymore, but it's all he knows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rickon the Wild

  
  


He doesn’t remember his father much.

They say that he was a good man, an _honorable_ man, and he doesn’t think they’re lying, but he was so young when his father went to the capital, when they chopped off his head and stuck it on a pike for everyone to see. The memories he does have, he’s not sure if they’re even real. He’s not sure if he really remembers, or if it’s a story someone told him.

He remembers more of his mother, but even then it’s not much. Red hair, soft hands and gentle scoldings. He wishes he could recall more of her. He remembers loving her very much and missing her very much. He wishes he had more.

She was nothing like Osha, he knows that much. Osha’s hands are rough, her scoldings everything but gentle. And he loves Osha too, just as much as his mother. Sometimes he thinks he loves her more. His memories are filled with Osha. The first time he slipped into Shaggy’s mind, it was Osha who brought him back, shaking him in the night and practically shouting his name in his ear. It was Osha who taught him the word ‘warg,’ told him stories of the ones she’d known, told him the _rules._  Never eat manflesh. Never mate with another wolf. Never take the mind of another man. She was the one who taught him how to skin a rabbit, how to shoot a bow, how to hold a spear. Osha was there the first time he killed a man-- didn’t sic Shaggydog on him, the first time _he_ killed one-- and she held him so tight it hurt and told him that it would get easier, with time.

She was right.

Osha never lied to him, not once. She was no nanny, she told him, it wasn’t her job to sing him lullabies and tell him that the world was fair. The world was brutal and ugly and she told him as much, and she kept him alive.

He remembers when Osha seemed so tall. And then, one day, he realizes that he is taller than her, and she seems smaller every day. She scowls and calls him a weed, and he doesn’t quite remember when she stops calling him “a weed” and starts calling him “my weed,” but she always says it the same way.

He hears that there’s a war going on, he hears of battles great and bloody. He hears talk of kings and gods. But he doesn’t see much of that. He sees a lot of battlefields once all the living are gone, though. He and Shaggy chase off the crows while Osha checks the corpses for anything useful. He hates the smell of it, but it’s something he gets used to.

He sees a lot of empty villages, and it takes him a very long time to realize that they weren’t always like that. That they’re not _supposed_ to be like that.

One day they hear that the war is over, and Osha tells him that it’s time to take him back home. And he doesn’t understand, not quite. Isn’t he _already_ home, with her? Isn’t ‘home’ what you call an inn room when you can find one, and the forest floor when you can’t? Isn’t ‘home’ a wolf at your side and a knife under your pillow?

He remembers a place, cold and grey and beautiful, that he loved with all his heart, that he used to miss so much he cried at the thought of it, but it hasn’t been ‘home’ for years now.

They go back, and a woman greets them at the gates, and at first he thinks it’s his mother. She has the same red hair, and when she runs to him and embraces him he feels the same soft hands. But she says she’s his sister, and that can’t be right. He remembers a girl with a dreamy look, a girl who he would make shriek with handfuls of worms that he dug up in the courtyard, and this isn’t her. It can’t be her.

He never gets used to sleeping in the keep. “Just imagine it’s an inn room,” Osha tells him, but he can’t. Inns were noisy and they creaked and leaked and smelled like sweat and ale and piss, and there’s none of that now. The walls are too solid. The air is too still. He sneaks off to the kennels most nights, beds down with Shaggydog and the rest of the hounds. Other nights he goes to the inn, finds a pretty girl if he can, and drinks until he can fall asleep in her arms. Sansa tells him that he shouldn’t, that he’s a lord, that it’s not becoming of him. He smiles and nods and promises not to do it again, because he knows she’s trying to help, but he also knows she’ll never understand.

He’s not sure he’ll ever understand her, either. He’ll never understand why she always smiles and makes her voice as sweet as it can be when she’s talking to someone she doesn’t like, or the look she gets in her eyes when a man gets close. One time they were walking together and she tripped and he reached out to catch her, and she pulled away so fast he’d wondered if he’d hurt her somehow.

He grows to love his oldest sister, clever and beautiful and broken in a way she’ll never show, but he doesn’t understand her. Some people call him the lord of Winterfell, but she’s the one who really rules it. She tries to teach him how to run things, but after a while, after the dozenth time he’s wandered off to chase a deer or a bird or a girl, she just gives up. They call her the Queen in the North, and he knows they’re right. And he doesn’t mind one bit.

For a while it’s just the two of them. All the other Starks are dead, they say. But then a woman shows up at the gates, her face as blank as a mask, and she says her name is Arya. He believes it before Sansa does, because he’s not afraid to believe it like she is is. He remembers his other sister, a girl who smiled when she won fights, a girl with a gleam in her eye and a stick in her hand. Now she’s got a sword instead of a stick, and he never sees the same smile, but he thinks he can still see the gleam if he looks close.

He understands Arya better, he thinks. He finds her pacing the halls at night when everyone else should be asleep, sees the bags under her eyes, and he understands. He sees her picking at the fine food they serve at the table and finds her perched in the kitchens later that day, sucking down a bowl of stew with the servants, and he understands. He brings her to the inn with him one night and watches as she hangs at the corners of the crowd-- until a patron starts harassing a serving girl. And when the man staggers out the door, clutching a broken nose that will never heal right, she smiles. It’s not the same smile he remembers-- it’s too hard, too cold-- but it’s the first real expression he’s seen on her since she got there.

She visits the inn most nights, with or without him. Usually she’s content to sit in the corner, nursing an ale and watching the crowd. Sometimes she’s coaxed out of hiding, to join in a brawl or arm wrestle a man too cocky for his own good. Sometimes he sees her going upstairs with the same men she’s beaten, a grin on both their faces.

Sansa makes a show of scolding her, and it usually ends in a shouting match, but he knows there’s no real venom to their words. Sometimes he thinks they enjoy their arguments, as they ease into their insults like they’re greeting an old friend.

He smells his brother before he sees him.

He’s sharing Shaggydog’s skin, and he’s in the godswood, and he’s on the trail of a doe, and then it’s _there,_ a smell he’d almost forgotten, a smell he only dreamed about for years. And he starts to run, because he’s so afraid he’ll _lose_ it again, he _can’t_ lose it again--

And then he sees it. The great grey wolf that he would recognize among a thousand wolves, and his brother sees him too, he _sees_ him. And he’s running to get his sisters as soon as his legs are his own again, because he’s _back,_ Bran is _back._

His brother has gotten taller, though it’s hard to tell how much when he’s being carried. He still rides in the arms of a man with giant’s blood, and there’s still a girl by his side-- a woman now, thin and green-eyed and somehow sad, even when she’s laughing.

He remembers another boy with his brother, with the same green eyes, but he doesn’t ask about his fate. The world is brutal and ugly, and he remembers this well enough.

Sansa cries when she sees Bran again, and he thinks he sees Arya crying too, and when he tells her she punches his arm so hard it stings for hours.

When Osha sees him, she just sniffs and nods and says “I guess you managed not to die then,” and goes back to her business before Bran can notice she’s smiling (he thinks Bran noticed, though, even if she tried to hide it).

Bran doesn’t talk much to anyone besides Meera, and he wonders if his brother remembers how to. His brother’s better in the skin of an animal-- not just Summer’s, but any beast. For a while he wonders if Bran really wants to be there, if he missed his family at all, but then he sees the cat trailing behind Arya as she heads to the inn, or the crow perched on Sansa’s windowsill as she works, and he understands.

He catches wind of the rumors eventually, of course. He hears the people whispering about him and his brother and sisters. The kinder ones say that they’re to be pitied, that they’ve been through so much, it’s no wonder they’re all so strange. The less-kind ones compare him and his brother to wildlings, say they’re no better than them now. They call Arya mad, and say Sansa’s not fit to rule Winterfell. They say all the Stark children are broken one way or another, and he’s not sure they’re wrong about that. He sees in in Sansa’s smiles that don’t reach her eyes, and in Arya’s blank expressions. He sees it in they way Bran looks away when he’s talking to people, and in himself too. Running is all he knows, that he’s forgotten how to stand still. And he doesn’t know if he’ll ever learn how to again.

He can’t bring himself to leave for a long time, even after what’s left of his family is reunited. He’s afraid that if he leaves, if he looks away for more than a second, his brother and sisters will be gone again. He hears the calling of the forest, longs for what he knows as home, but the call of family is stronger.

For a time.

Sansa gets married, and the smallfolk say it’s about time, that she’s waited far too long already. Her husband is the fourth son of one of their bannermen, and he is short and chubby and has to count on his fingers, but he’s sweet and gentle and never touches his wife without her permission.

Bran and Meera have been sharing a bed for years, and one day at breakfast Meera announces that they intend to marry. Their ceremony is small and quiet and some of the smallfolk whisper that it didn’t even happen, but the Stark children, broken as they are, have learned how to ignore the whispers by now.

At both wedding feasts, Arya loudly proclaims that she will never marry. Sansa clucks her tongue and says she’ll change her mind eventually, but he doesn’t think anyone really believes that.

Sansa gives birth to a little boy named Eddard. He waits for his little nephew to turn one before he leaves.

He asks Osha if she’ll come with him, but she laughs and turns him down. She’s old, she says. She tells him that he intends to spend what’s left of her life lying in a feather bed and getting fat. “You go, my weed,” She says, “Be free and savage as you please, and don’t concern yourself with a withered old wildling.” And when he gives her a hug she smacks his ear and tells him to get _off,_ he’s making an ass of himself.

She’s nothing like his mother, he knows, but he loves her just as much. Sometimes he thinks he loves her more.

Sansa hugs him at the gate, so tight it hurts, and he _swears_ to her, on gods old and new, that he’ll be back.

And he keeps his promise. He travels the land, sees the Wall and the Crownlands and Dorne, he goes _home,_ to an inn room when he can find one and the forest floor when he can’t. He never forgets the bloody battlefields and the empty villages, but now he’s big enough and strong enough to do something about it. Bandits learn to lay low when they hear of large wolves in the area, and sellswords know to mind their manners when they hear a Stark is nearby.  And the world is still brutal and ugly and unfair, but he does what he can to make it just a little less so.

But he always goes back to Winterfell. He kisses his oldest sister on the cheek and ruffles his little nephew’s hair-- red as his mother’s. He listens to Arya recount her own adventures, because they’ve both forgotten how to stop running, but they’re not running _from_ anything anymore, they’re running _to._ And he smiles at the crow that greets him at the gate, because he understands.

The people write songs about him. They call him “Prince of the Wolves.” They call him “Rickon the Wild.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> AND THEY ALL LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER AND NOBODY DIED. THE END.
> 
> I've always had a soft spot for Rickon, even if he's yet to really DO anything, mostly because there is NO WAY he's growing up normal. This is MOSTLY show-based, especially with Sansa's characterization, but I tried to leave things more-or-less open to interpretation for the book fans.


End file.
